Tie My Bones to Her Back (32 page)

A groan went up from the Elk Soldiers, and Cut Ear muttered something obscene.

“Yes,”
Two Shields said, “we will let them take all the horses and lift all the scalps as well! Our job is to get that gun. Now tell me, Badger, did you see a wagon with a black tepee on it when you scouted the train?”

Badger Walker grunted but said nothing, averting his eyes.

“I saw it,” Pony Quirts said. “It’s at the head of the column, the biggest rolling thing of them all. It is dragged along by many white pulling-buffalo. The animals hitched to the other rolling things are different colors, black, red, blue. Only this one has white buffalo.”

“Good. If we move fast the spiders won’t have time to uncover the gun and start firing at us. It could kill us all before we get to the spiders. I will ask Big Face to shoot many arrows from cover before we charge. That might throw the spiders into confusion, giving us time to reach the gun before they do. Now tell me truly, will you do as I ask?”

The Elks muttered some more, but finally nodded their heads. Then they ran off to paint their faces for war.

“Will they obey your orders?” Otto asked once the Elks had gone.

Tom shrugged. “I hope so,” he said in English. “But it’s a strange idea to them, thinking ahead like this. A Cheyenne soldier sees war as a one-man fight, kind of a wild, bloody game to test his courage, show his contempt for death. And it helps that maybe they’ll win something special by playing the game—hair, horses, women, honor. Oh sure, they’ll get together in a fight sometimes to rescue another Cheyenne, even to retrieve his body under fire, but that’s just another way of showing their bravery.” He paused, clearly discouraged. “Well,” he said at last, “we’ll soon have the answer.”

“I’ll ride with you,” Otto told him. “Maybe just the two of us can bring it off. I know from the war that you fire a Gatling by turning a crank, not pulling a trigger. I won’t need fingers for that. But you’ll have to load and aim it for me.”

Two Shields was silent for a moment. Then in Cheyenne he said,
“Hó-nehe Vého, tséhe-ve’toveto.
Wolf Chief. . . my brother.”

21

M
ILO
S
YKES HAD
waited until His Lordship was deep in his bath, engrossed in his newspaper.
The Times
was still following the Ashanti campaign, and the British had finally triumphed. “My God, Blandish,” Sir Harry exclaimed. “Listen to this: ‘When the Black Watch at long last entered King Kofi’s barbarous capital, they found it empty—except for thousands of skulls neatly stacked in a sacred grove, proof positive of human sacrifice.’ Ghastly! But then the butcher’s bill on our side was only 18 killed and 185 wounded, though another 55 poor sods died of fever. The White Man’s Grave,’ indeed.”

Blandish hovered near the tub like a mother hen. “Yes indeed, m’Lord, not at all like this salubrious climate.”

As the Limeys babbled on, Sykes eased into the silken cave of His Lordship’s sleeping quarters. He knew that Sir Harry had brought many pairs of spectacles with him, redundancy in case of breakage, and that he left them lying all over the place for Blandish to pick up. Sure enough, there were three pairs, in their embroidered cases, on the bedtable beside Sir Harry’s couch, along with a stack of leather-bound books. Sykes stepped over, pocketed a pair of the glasses, and walked quietly out of the tent. His Lordship would never miss them, and if he did, he’d blame his flunky.

An hour later the wagon train was creaking southeastward over the prairies, the tents struck and packed, teams harnessed, pickets riding ahead about a quarter of a mile in case of trouble—all of the routines running smoothly now, just another day on the prairie. But Sykes had a crawly feeling in the small of his back, the pit of his stomach. Mister Lo was out there, and McKay, that bastard, had slipped off before dawn “to have a look-see,” leaving Milo to fend for himself. Well, he was fending.

He dropped behind the stragglers and pulled out the spectacles case, fumbled it open, and put on the glasses. Thank God, their eyes were the same in their wretchedness! Relief. No—wonderment! It was as he had dreamed—suddenly the world snapped into a clarity of focus it had lost for Milo sometime back around the Battle of Shiloh, where he’d taken a blow upside the head from the steel-shod butt of a Union musket in the confusion of the peach orchard. On sheer reflex he’d managed to bury his bayonet to the hilt, just above the Yankee’s belt buckle, but ever since then his vision had been fading. Slowly at first, allowing him to make a living for a time as a wolfer, or meat hunting for the railroad navvies, or finally gambling, but then more swiftly and severely. The bright burning light of the prairie sped it along—at night the sky flamed behind his sore eyelids even in sleep. He tried town for a while, Leavenworth, Hays, Ellsworth, Dodge. Soon he’d been forced to give up cards—he couldn’t even count the spots on a deuce accurately. He’d been reduced to skinning shaggies working in filth and grease and the smell of death. The only good thing about his declining vision, he often thought, was that he couldn’t see himself clearly in a mirror. What he saw, the dim outline of his face, was as he remembered it. But he was sure now that he was ugly. A man could feel such things—the way that bohunk bitch had recoiled from him whenever he came near her.

Now and then he got letters from his wife, back in Marysville. The young’uns needed this or that, no clothes for the coming winter, the cow died or the sow died, suchlike guff. For a while he’d sent her what money he could, but soon he could spare none and ceased writing entirely. A withered whimpering scold she’d be by now, string-necked and flabby-titted, full of the stink of Jesus, like all married women, the sour smell of sanctity coming off her where once she’d smelled of fire. If he had to, he could go back to her, but he dreaded the thought of the young’uns—the whining and the snot, frail pallid little things that stank of baby shit. Well, they’d be all growed by now, married, with kids of their own—a slew of brats, probably. He’d have to smell ’em. More yet he dreaded the plow—often in his dreams he was plowing a row of heavy red clay that stretched to the dim horizon, staring at the scrawny, dung-caked, high-hipped west end of an eastbound mule. He’d wake in a sweat, shuddering with fatigue.

But now he felt better than he had in years. The world was back in focus—clear and crisp, with all the hairs on it. He hadn’t realized how important clear vision was to a man. Anything was possible, now he could see. He was awed by the notion. Anything . . .

At the edge of his vision was movement, and he turned toward it with newfound delight to see what forgotten wonders it might reveal. A covey of quail, buzzing out low and frantic from an arroyo to his left, one of them breaking away from the group and flying his way . . . It was an arrow, winging in hard against the china-blue sky. He marveled for an instant at the hard-edged clarity of the image, the red and blue—no, black—circlets of color just back of the arrowhead, the snakelike sinuations along its length, the wavelike motion of the turkey-feather fletches, shimmering as they caught the sunlight. A cloud of arrows, he saw, the sky suddenly specked with them. Arrows about to fall.

He twisted away and kicked his pony.

Something smacked him hard and high, toward the middle of his back. He looked down. An arrowhead protruded from the front of his shirt, below the short ribs, angling earthward. A long, narrow, black, barbed hunk of iron bound with sinew to a greasewood shaft and painted near the binding in circles of red-and-black ocher. The arrowhead blossomed with gobbets of fat, yellow fat that shivered like jelly, gleamed like the sun.
His fat.
The horse bucked as another arrow swatted its haunch. Holding on for his life, Milo felt the arrow shaft working in his chest as they bucketed out of the column. Oxen and mules screamed in bouquets, in wreaths of feathery spines. Two men were down, three or four—more. A runaway wagon crushed a fallen man’s chest. Horses pelted past with empty saddles. From the coulee to the left of the column rose a cloud of boiling dust, flashing with heat lightning and the flap of red and blue and black blankets, riders jogged crosswise dragging mesquite bushes from the tails of their supernaturally long ponies; other riders raced naked and gaudy across toward them, mirrors flaring, some of them blowing bone whistles high and eerie and the sky filled with a hoarse yipping like the skies of autumn, full of geese. How bad was he hit, he’d be bled out by now if the arrow’d taken lung or heart or a vein: the fat leaking from him gleaming in the light of the sun didn’t matter so long as he could tuck it back in, and it’d block the wound better, wouldn’t bleed so hard that way, might could make it to the Dobe Walls . . .

F
ROM THE TOP
of the butte half a mile away, Raleigh watched the attack unfold. It was pitiless. It was masterful. The Indians had hidden themselves well within arrow range in a shallow brush-grown gorge not far from the trail. The first fall of their arrows threw the column into disarray. The dust and the flash of mirrors, the flapping of blankets, the pipes and the war cries only spurred the stock deeper into panic. Malcombe’s men were too busy trying to control their teams to think of defensive measures. Why wasn’t someone running for the Gatling?

He saw the first painted riders hit the column, bows bent and loosed, lances flashing, hatchets and stone-crowned war clubs swinging. White men sprawled and bled in the dust, brained or speared or shot through and through with arrows fired at point-blank range. The cutting edge of the Indian attack punched through the wagon train in two places, reducing it to three separate, milling, confused, and disconnected parts. He could see Lord Malcombe, his hounds around him, trying to rally his men at the head of the column, draw their wagons into a defensive circle.

The Gatling was still shrouded.

But the Indians were too fast for Sir Harry’s men. Too many mules and oxen were down already. Wagon piled on wagon, some tipped sideways, spilling dunnage and boxes into the dirt. The crash and tinkle of shattering china came faintly to his ears. A ragged sputter of gunfire from the midst of the melee, Sir Harry’s pistols drawn and bucking. A gaunt mastiff leaped and dragged an Indian from his horse, tore his throat out, looked up redmuzzled and snarling as three arrows sprouted magically from the dog’s shoulders. Gouts of thick white gunsmoke rose from the boiling dust and trailed raggedly downwind, obscuring Sir Harry’s thin, bespectacled, red-jacketed figure from Raleigh’s view.

Where to look, where to look next?

Elkhounds bounded like black rubber balls over the prairie, in pursuit of a belly-ripped ox which trailed both its harness and intestines in a long dusty tangle. He saw a young Cheyenne ride headlong after Blandish as the manservant fled toward an overturned wagon. The warrior swung his hatchet in a bright arc that split his victim’s skull to the chin as neatly as a halved melon. An Airedale dashed out of the smoke and howled mournfully. A knot of Indians had found the commissary wagon, skewered its driver, and were helping themselves to whiskey.

Then he saw Otto and Tom Shields fighting their way toward the wagon that held the Gatling gun. Sir Harry saw them, too, and broke away from the main fight, racing them for the prize.

W
OLF
C
HIEF LED
the way.
Never been part of a cavalry charge before
, Otto thought,
only on the receiving end.
He was giddy with the thunder of it. As they pounded down on the train, he saw bearded white men gaping at them, some running, others crouched beside the wagon wheels. Their guns spouted smoke, but he couldn’t hear the shots for the hoofbeats of the ponies and the whooping of the Kiowas. Then suddenly they were among the wagons. Men and dogs bounced from the shoulders of his horse, sprawling in the dust. He heard Tom yipping behind him, the keening of whistles, grunts and screams, and a low, feral snarling of men and animals locked in mortal combat, all punctuated by the bang and pop of gunfire. The wagon he rode for was on the far side of the tangle. It appeared and disappeared in clouds of dust and gunsmoke. The reek of sulphur filled his mouth.

“There it is,” Tom yelled. The black canvas cover of the Gatling loomed straight ahead. No one was in the wagon yet. They dismounted directly into the wagon box. With a whip of his belt knife Tom cut the lashings of the canvas and pulled it clear. The magazine drum was already in place. Bullets snapped close overhead, and looking up, Otto saw two men in cowboy hats kneeling beside an overturned cart, fumbling at cartridge boxes, reloading their fancy double rifles.

“Get those fellows, Tom!” he shouted, pointing with his maimed hand. Tom grabbed up his Yellow Boy from where he’d laid it in the wagonbed and fired twice, dropping one of the shooters. The other man ducked behind the cart.

“All right,” Otto ordered. “Point the Gatling toward where that man just hid.” Tom swung the gun’s heavy brass barrel into line. As the barrel depressed, Otto sighted along it.
On target!
He had never fired a Gatling, only read about the gun. Not knowing what to expect, he stepped to the right of the gun and turned the firing crank with his stubbed left hand. The barrel spun and roared
—Herr Gott
, he thought,
like uncorking a bottle of thunder.
Empty brass clattered in the wagon box, and through the smoke Otto could see bullets rip the bottom of the cart. “Work it from side to side a bit,” he yelled over the gun’s stutter. They raked the wagon. Then Otto looked for another target.